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Memoir Experiment Part Two

I vaguely remember—this must have been the late seventies—nuns trolling the neat pathways between our desks, doling out small handfuls of salted peanuts and little Dixie cups of orange juice. It was all very gulag like. I’m not sure what sort of program this was, as a Catholic school probably would not have been receiving barrels of government surplus nuts. I laugh now at the thought, since it’s a felony to even bring nuts within 50 feet of a school. I guess we didn’t have many allergies in those days. Or those who died of anaphylactic shock were buried in shallow graves behind the school playground where I lived out my daily hell of dodge ball.

But for whatever reason, we were given our daily ration, for a time at any rate. The program was short lived. Perhaps they realized it wasn’t caloric deficit preventing us from mastering our multiplication tables, but just stupidity, a condition immune to even the most intensive nut-and-juice-based treatment techniques. The Dominican nuns eyed us suspiciously, making certain we choked down the rancid nuts and bolted our little cups of astronaut-grade orange beverage. They monitored each aisle carefully, fastidious sentries, with their giant black rosaries like long strands of beetles, ready to come to life and devour us all.

And they monitored the lunchrooms too, perhaps on the lookout for obscure forms of dietary heresy. But of course they never really noticed when anything truly horrible was happening. One day a student—not a bully and not particularly mean, but something of a joker—launched his chair out from the table as I walked past looking for a seat. I went sprawling across the floor to great peels of laughter, my food scattered across the recently buffed floor. I don’t even remember now what kind of food it was that I would have eaten. I remember that for weeks I had a large green bruise on my hip, the size and shape of a turkey drumstick, a tattooed reminder of that humiliating episode. I also remembered that the student who pulled this prank wasn’t laughing. He looked sick.

I try to keep things in perspective and to remember instances like this when I recall the casual cruelties I’ve committed over the years.

My memories of school are mostly characterized by a distinctly dystopian feel. Perhaps this is because I attended Catholic school, though I think all institutions are essentially dystopian, school, prison, corporate workplace—not much to choose between. It turns out that school really does prepare us for the “adult world.” God help us all.

See also:

Memoir Experiment Part One

My first distinct, detailed memory dates from 1974. It was summer, and we were moving into the house on Larchmont, where I grew up on the west side of Springfield, Illinois. I ran up the stairs and down the hallway, straight to my new bedroom. It was to be my own bedroom—for several years, my sisters had to share a room, even though there were four bedrooms in the house. The pink room, as we called it, later became Eileen’s room. My father had had plans to turn it into some sort of office, though he never did. I only remember it in the early days as a storage room for random junk.

I was very excited about my own future room, and I remember racing up the stairs and down the hallway with my mother in pursuit. I reached the end of the hall and flung myself down onto the orange carpeting and kept repeating, “This is my room!” My mother caught up to me and chastised me, telling me to get up off the floor, because the carpet was dirty.

My parents had a strange habit of referring to various things by color. My bedroom was the orange room, named for that same dirty carpet. The walls of the room were beige, in keeping with the quasi-suburban feel of the west side in those days. Eileen’s room was the pink room, named for the walls—the carpet was red. Kathleen’s was the blue room, both walls and carpet were blue. Mom and Dad’s room had walls and carpets that were green, but for some reason, this room escaped the moniker “the green room”—it was simply “Mom and Dad’s room.”

Initially cars were referred to by color and make: the white Pontiac, the green Chevy. Then there was a brief and confusing period during which no clear pattern was discernible. The Aspen wagon should have been the metallic copper Dodge. And the bronze metallic VW Rabbit was simply the Volkswagen, presumably to highlight the vaguely alien aspect of the only foreign car my father was ever convinced to buy (though it was manufactured in the US, in Pennsylvania, I believe). Suddenly the scheme was simplified, reaching an apex of color-based organization. The blue car, the red car, and the purple car came in sequence, being a navy blue Ford Taurus station wagon, a cranberry metallic Chevrolet Corsica my grandmother had driven before she died, and a burgundy Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon, actually closer to the color of dried blood. My sister had driven this last car while in law school and shortly after, but left it behind when she moved to California. I drove it while in college and my friend Herchel and I called it the government car or the FBI car, because it was a large American sedan. We drove around Lake Springfield in that car, drinking cheap beer. Later Herchel married and gave up beer for diet soda. He found Jesus. He died of brain cancer.

See also:

Memoir Experiment: Introduction

When is it appropriate to start writing one’s memoirs? If you are a figure of prominence, power, or popularity, you might have to wait until the moment is right, when the career has peaked in some way. But if you are a nobody, any time is the right time. And I think everyone should try to write this down. I greatly enjoyed reading A Man with no Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer* and Memoirs of a Breton Peasant.* The simple details of an ordinary life can prove fascinating.

I think I’ve reached the age at which one grows more reflective, turning inward. How did I get here? This whole journey seems improbable and frankly pointless. Why am I who I am? I think the way I reflect on the common details of my remembered background is probably a better approximation of an answer to that question than the details, the facts themselves. So here’s an experiment, kind of like a journal or diary. I’ve always meant to keep one of those but never have. It just seems like it would create another odious obligation. Instead I’ll periodically jot something down, when some memory assaults me. And one memory leads to another with no apparent pattern. I’ll follow these associative chains and see where, if anywhere, they lead. Lucky you.

See also:

We’re back!

Sorry for the absence recently! Our web host had upgraded some technologies I use for the site and so I needed to upgrade the site to be compatible… And I took the opportunity to move the site to a new host. I still have a lot of back-end work to do, but at least the blog is functional for now. Thanks for your patience!

xoxoxo,
tree

New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-04-07

  • Manual of Typography by Giambattista Bodoni, Stephan Füssel
  • Cities of the World by Georg Braun, Franz Hogenberg
  • Private by Dian Hanson
  • Chinese Propaganda Poster by Anchee Min, Duo Duo, StefanR. Landsberger
  • Starck
  • Logo Design Volume 2 by Julius Weidemann
  • The History of Men's Magazines Vol 3: 1960s at the Newsstand by Dian Hanson
  • First Editions: A Guide to Identification
  • Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami
  • Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami
  • Vegan with a Vengeance by IsaChandra Moskowitz
  • Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words by Jay Rubin
  • South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
  • South of the Sun by Wade Miller
  • As They Reveled by Philip Wylie
  • Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
  • Death Has 2 Faces by Norman Herries
  • Essays by William Hazlitt
  • The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño
  • Blackstock's Collections by GregoryL. Blackstock
  • Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity by Marc Augé
  • Pictures of Girls by Zak Smith

New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-03-24

  • Books at Brown 1991-1992 Volumes XXXVIII-XXXIX by JohnH. Stanley
  • Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece by Declan Kiberd
  • Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
  • The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño
  • Postcards from Penguin: One Hundred Book Covers in One Box
  • I Love You, OK? by Gary Taxali
  • The Eye of The Sibyl and Other Classic Stories (The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 5) by Philip K. Dick
  • The Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick Volume 4: The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick
  • Second Variety and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick
  • A Vade-Mecum for Malt-Worms; or, a Guide to good-Fellows; being a description of the manners and customs of the most eminent Publick Houses in the cities of London and Westminster. [A Guide for Malt-Worms, etc.) In verse. by Edward Ward

New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-03-16

  • Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs
  • Saint Melissa the Mottled by Edward Gorey
  • Psycho Too by Will Self
  • Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates by Martin Hopkinson
  • The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 by William Manchester
  • Dictionaries and That Dictionary by James Sledd, WilmaR. Ebbitt
  • Middle C by William H. Gass
  • Alchemists Through the Ages by ArthurE. Waite
  • The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
  • Regan's Planet by Robert Silverberg
  • One Hundred And Two H-Bombs by Thomas M. Disch
  • Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
  • Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham
  • Dimension Thirteen by Robert Silverberg
  • The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson

How Important Is the Sound of the Words to Your Writing?

“Vital.”

That’s the short answer to a great question posed to William H. Gass at the reading and book signing event for his new novel, Middle C.* He did expand on that, of course. But what a perfect word: vital. And Gass’s statement, “Vital,” was perfectly delivered. Slow. Stark. Sensual. And with exactly the right pause afterward. Exactly.

Thank you, Mr. Gass, thank you.

middle c front cover

Beware the Monkey’s Paw? Fiddlesticks, I Say.

We had driven to Toronto during the summer of 2006 and were spending a few days wandering about the city on foot. I remember that we went to some bookstores, though not one of them stands out to me as anything special. I do recall that I bought a nice newish Penguin Classics edition of Malcolm Lowery’s Under the Volcano—it had a cover I admired and had not seen. Flash forward to this afternoon as I leisurely read the The New York Times. Stephen Fowler opened up a tiny bookshop in Toronto … in 2006! The Monkey’s Paw is the very form of what an ideal bookshop might be … eccentric in every aspect. I won’t bother describing it … just read the article. Rest assured that on our next visit to Toronto, I will be stopping in and buying some of these treasures. And I’m sure anyone who knows me or has seen some of the odder corners of my book collection will know why this place and its owner resonate so much with me.

(No) New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-03-10

Yeah, sorry. I wasn’t very motivated last week, so I didn’t enter any more inventory. Not that we don’t have a bunch that still needs to be entered… I’ll try to be better about it next week.

In the meantime, enjoy Tom Waits and Bono reading a couple of Charles Bukowski’s poems.

“You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you.”

New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-03-03

OK! OK! OK! I did write the thing to automate showing the new arrivals! I think doing that took me less time than putting together last week’s post did. Definitely worth it.

So here’s what I added to inventory this week… We’re keeping them all in our private collection for now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy them from someone else…

  • The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño
  • The Temple of Iconoclasts by J.Rodolfo Wilcock
  • Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
  • By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
  • Ecologica by André Gorz
  • But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz by Geoff Dyer
  • Notebooks of a Naked Youth by Billy Childish
  • Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer
  • Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Adorno
  • IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale by Mitch Steele
  • Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
  • The Copyeditor's Handbook by Amy Einsohn

What We Talk About When We Talk About Shopping†

So, how do you shop? I mean… I mean a lot of things, actually… But the gist is, how do you shop?

Evidently women love to shop. Evidently I am not a woman. Oh wait.

I don’t love to shop. And I am a woman. So let’s just dispel the myth that women love to shop right now.

Now that that’s out of the way… Here’s how I shop in two steps (sort of):

1. I recognize the need for a particular item, be it a specifically specific particular item, or a sort of I-need-this-but-need-to-find-out-what-kinds-of-this-are-available particular item.

2. If my need is for a specifically specific particular item that I can (and am not too lazy to) get locally, I go to the local vendor, locate the item, and buy it.

2a. If my need is for a specifically specific particular item that I can’t (or am too lazy to) get locally, I locate the online retailer that would sell said item, add it to my cart, and buy it.

2b. If my need is for a sort of I-need-this-but-need-to-find-out-what-kinds-of-this-are-available particular item, I search around online until I find what I like (and can afford), and buy it.

I don’t go shopping. I have something in mind, I locate it, I purchase it. I don’t look at other things and browse around. I don’t go to a store just to look around. I never go to a mall unless I need something from the Apple Store or Sephora, and then, only because we don’t have them as free-standing stores in Saint Louis (to my knowledge) or, in the case of the Apple Store, when Mac HQ doesn’t have what I need.

The exceptions to this are: local produce, wine, books and records (to an extent), groceries (to an extent), and vintage/thrift/antiques. I love to browse the farmers’ market. I love to browse liquor stores. I love to browse book and record stores, but often I do just go straight for what I’m looking for. Patrick does the grocery shopping, mostly. And who doesn’t love thrifting/antiquing?

So enough about me. What this is really about is you. Knowing I’m probably not exactly the best barometer for what people talk about when they talk about shopping, I asked Patrick the other day if he thought people shopped online the same way they do in physical stores (I do: go straight to what you want, add to cart, check out). Or do people tend to browse around physical stores, but not online stores? Or vice versa?

So I’m asking: What do you talk about when you talk about shopping? Are you a get in, get what you want, get out kind of person, or a browse around kind of person? Is it different depending on whether you’re in a store, using your mobile device, or sitting at your computer? Do you look at the “other people who bought this item also viewed these items” items? Do you look at “if you like this item you’ll love these items” items? Do you go to an online bookstore and navigate to a genre and start paging through it?

†I bastardized this from Haruki Murakami.* UPDATE: Patrick just told me that Murakami borrowed it from Raymond Carver.* hee. hee.

New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-02-24

First, happy birthday (yesterday), to Chris!

This week, I’m showing you everything we’ve added to inventory, whether we have it for sale or not… And I know this is going to be painful enough (to me) that I’ll end up writing some functionality whereby I can just say, “Show all the things we’ve added to our inventory between X and Y,” so I don’t have do manually type out each thing… which I’m about to do. Here goes:

  • Freud’s Vienna & Other Essays by Bruno Bettelheim

freud's vienna

  • Prose, Essays, Poems by Gottfried Benn

prose essays poems

  • Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms by Donald J. Borror

dictionary of word roots

  • Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay

learned pigs

  • Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann

nietzsche

  • Lytton Strachey: The New Biography by Michael Holroyd

lytton strachey

  • Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America 1619-1964 by Lerone Bennett Jr.

before the mayflower

  • The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse

luck of the bodkins

  • Lord Emsworth and Others by P. G. Wodehouse

lord emsworth

  • The Queen of Spades and Other Stories by Pushkin

queen of spades

  • A New Dictionary of Music by Arthur Jacobs

new dictionary of music

  • Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell

peter abelard

  • White Noise by Don DeLillo

white noise

  • Dispatches by Michael Herr

dispatches

  • The Information by Martin Amis

the information

  • The Jewish War by Josephus

the jewish war

  • A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter Skeat

concise etymological dictionary

  • A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

a passage to india

  • The Bookman’s Glossary by Mary C. Turner

bookman's glossary

  • Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt by Richard Brautigan

rommel drives on deep into egypt

  • Music in England by Eric Blom

music in england

  • Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon

memoirs of an infantry officer

  • Memoirs by Kingsley Amis

memoirs by kingsley amis

  • Writing Home by Arnold Bennett

writing home

  • Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña

been down so long

  • Blow Job by Stewart Home

blow job

  • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

the garden of the finzi

  • Ancestors: A Family History by William Maxwell

ancestors

  • The Free-lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed

free-lance pallbearers

  • A Way in the World by V. S. Naipaul

a way in the world

  • The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov

the enchanter

  • Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

amusing ourselves to death

  • The Fourth Angel by John Rechy

the fourth angel

  • Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul

half a life

  • The Polish Complex by Tadeusz Konwicki

the polish complex

  • A Dreambook for Our Time by Tadeusz Konwicki

dreambook for our time

  • The End of Education by Neil Postman

the end of education

  • Two Towns in Provence by M.F.K. Fisher

two towns in provence

  • Heliopolis by James Scudamore

heliopolis

  • Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

middlesex

  • City of Glass by Paul Auster

city of glass

Wow! What a list. I sure was busy last week. Unfortunately, though, most of these books are not for sale for one reason or another (we want to read, we’re adding to to our Penguin collection, we can’t sell them for enough for it to be worth our while, etc.). The ones that are for sale will be found on our Amazon.com storefront* the usual disclaimers apply: Our images will almost always have the orange background as shown here (the exception is the “main” image; amazon requires that to be on a white background, so if we’ve designated an image as main, it won’t have the orange background). To find our prices, go to “available from these sellers” and look for Hurley House. If you do not find a copy available from us in the list, then we’ve sold it already.

By the way, yes, that was painful enough that I will be writing something to help me automate it… it’s just a matter of when.

>

The Little Things

Two in one day!

I just had to share a little thing. A little thing that is one of the nice things about selling books online — in small quantity — and having a Post Office within walking distance.

I just got back from walking down to our local Post Office to mail a copy of Mehville’s The Confidence-Man* to New Jersey. It’s pretty cold out today, but very bright. The sky is that perfect shade of blue, and the half-ish moon has risen early and greeted me as I walked east on our block, toward the Post Office.

I was about half a block away from the Post Office, when I heard a sound like someone shuffling up behind me. I turned around and no one was there. Looking down I saw a dried hydrangea flower head making its way toward me.

Satisfied that I was in no danger, I walked on. That hydrangea caught up with me and stayed with me for a bit, then leapt in front of me and stopped. I stopped, too.

I looked down at the hydrangea and it up at me.

It just sat there looking like it wanted to tell me something.

We stayed that way for a few moments, then I grinned, and the hydrangea bounded off into a nearby yard. I happily made my way to the Post Office (where the employees are the greatest, by the way), then home again, and didn’t see the hydrangea again… it must have found somewhere else to go.

Thinking back on it, I think the hydrangea just wanted to tell me to have a nice day.

So I will.

It’s the little things.

New Arrivals Weekly Roundup 2013-02-17

This week we actually added something like 30 books to our inventory, but I’m only covering the ones we have for sale… plus one that’s just cool. K? K.

  • Man of Straw by Heinrich Mann

Man of straw

  • Samuel R. Delany’s Galaxies boxed set

Galaxies

  • Marius the Epicuriean by Walter Pater

Marius the Epicurean

  • An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

An Imaginary Life

  • A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter W. Skeat

A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language

  • In Defense of Reason by Yvor Winters

In Defense of Reason

  • Usage and Abusage by Eric Partridge

Usage and Abusage

  • And finally, not for sale, Inferna, the first book of poetry in a planned trilogy by Stefene Russell. This I bought at Mad Art Gallery. The cover art is by Firecracker Press. Very cool all around. I’ll have to do a little more research about how you may be able to buy your own copy. Possibly from Firecracker Press… maybe from other sources as well.

Inferna

All of these except Inferna are available as of this writing on our Amazon.com storefront.* Prices and images shown below may not reflect the copies we have for sale. Our images will almost always have the orange background as shown here (the exception is the “main” image; amazon requires that to be on a white background, so if we’ve designated an image as main, it won’t have the orange background). To find our prices, go to “available from these sellers” and look for Hurley House. If you do not find a copy available from us in the list, then we’ve sold it already.